Chapter Ninety-Six: The Poet Immortal and the Beggar

The porter saw at once that neither persuasion nor force would prevail against this band. Moreover, he knew all too well what Scholar Li was like: reckless, absurd, and more than capable of forgetting to pay after a night of drinking. At last, he gritted his teeth and decided to go inside to report the matter.

Only then did Yu Lang breathe easier. The Hanlin Academy, after all, was still a government office; if this matter dragged on or even turned into a larger scene, he could not say he would be able to hold the whole course of events firmly in his grasp.

After the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, the porter came back out again, all smiles. “Scholar Li entered the palace the night before last to accompany His Majesty on a night tour of the imperial gardens. He is probably still in the Great Bright Palace at this very moment. Since you are all so remarkably capable, why not go find him there yourselves?”

“Oh, and Director Yang said that Scholar Li has always been carefree and unconstrained in his conduct, so forgetting to pay for the wine is perfectly normal. Here are fifty taels of silver. Little miss, take it and be on your way. As for the matter of broken affections, let us speak no more of it. Courtesan girls are merely acting for the occasion. If you keep bringing up such things, I fear people will laugh their heads off.”

This Director Yang of the junior Hanlin office was quite a character. A few words, a few deft strokes, and he had resolved the matter cleanly and neatly. Yu Lang would have found no leverage at all, even if he had wanted to make trouble from it.

The three of them had no choice but to leave the junior Hanlin office in frustration and head back.

Yu Lang thanked Li Yazian again and again.

She waved a hand. “You gave me the money. There is nothing to thank me for. Putting on a performance like this is far better than selling smiles in the courtyard. I do not lose out on this deal. It is only a pity I could not help you find Li Taibai.”

“No matter. There will always be a chance to find my uncle. It is only a question of sooner or later.”

Li Yazian still felt she owed them, so she left that crooked little poem from the “false Li Bai” with Yu Lang as a keepsake. Only after Yu Lang accepted it did she depart with graceful ease and return to her Spring Charm Tower.

Du Fu counted on his fingers. “Including this time, this is already the seventh time I have come back empty-handed from the Hanlin Academy. Emperor Liu visited the thatched cottage three times and won Zhuge Liang; as for me...”

Yu Lang laughed. “Then you are trying to capture Meng Huo seven times and take this porter down once and for all. Still, fifty taels in hand means you have not lost out. After giving forty taels to Lady Li Yazian and spending three taels on lunch, you still made a net profit of seven taels. That is better than plenty of small business ventures.” He comforted Du Fu for a while, but his own spirits suddenly sank. “If we cannot get in touch with Uncle Taibai, then we cannot learn what is happening inside the palace. Two days have passed already. I wonder whether Yang Yuhuan is safe in the palace.”

“You are letting worry cloud your judgment. Our sovereign is not a cruel and bloodthirsty man. Quite the opposite, he values old ties deeply and would not take life lightly. Besides, since Li Taibai has remained in the palace to accompany His Majesty on his garden strolls and has not yet returned, it shows that His Majesty has been in a very good mood these past few days. We may not have seen the man himself, but the clues are enough to draw a conclusion.” Du Fu’s mind remained as precise as ever; by linking the matters together, he had gone straight to the heart of it.

Yu Lang finally nodded in relief. “All right. Then we will think of other ways. Good heavens, I nearly forgot: my two brothers, Xie Zhiqian and Xue Wenyang, are still wandering the Western Market. The two of them always lose all sense of measure when they are with me in Yangzhou City. They had better not stir up some trouble. Let us hurry over and check on them!”

The two of them had been dazzled by the Western Market’s dazzling array of goods. Things they would normally have had to scour the earth for were simply laid out on the first floor of the shops, while the rare treasures on the second and third floors were priced at astronomical levels.

They wandered for quite a while, and by the time the sun was high overhead, they finally felt hungry. Yet neither wanted to waste time going into an inn or restaurant for a proper meal, so they bought a few steamed buns to stave off hunger and kept on shopping.

A beggar resting under a tree shouted, “Give me a steamed bun to eat.”

Xie Zhiqian was kindhearted and immediately reached for a bun to give him.

Xue Wenyang stopped him, however, and said to the beggar, “Begging is not done so confidently and matter-of-factly. You should sound a little pleading, a little sincere, so passersby will be willing to give you a bun. I am not refusing you out of stinginess; I want to teach you a lesson. Otherwise, if we give you a bun this time and others refuse to give you one later, what then?”

The beggar gave a sneering laugh. “You sound very experienced. Looks like you have begged for your supper plenty of times yourself?”

“You!” Xue Wenyang flared up at once. He had meant only to help out of kindness, yet this beggar met him with mockery. He was so annoyed he could hardly breathe.

“Give it or don’t,” the beggar drawled. Begging with that kind of swagger was rather refreshingly odd.

“Then I simply will not give it,” Xue Wenyang said, pulling Xie Zhiqian along as he moved on, determined to ignore the man. Xie Zhiqian felt sorry for him, but seeing Xue Wenyang angry, he did not dare dispense his goodwill so recklessly.

“Wait.” Seeing that the two truly meant to leave, the beggar’s arrogance dimmed somewhat. “How about this? This genius will recite two lines of poetry I wrote myself. Consider it an equal exchange. What do you say?”

Xie Zhiqian had always looked favorably upon talented poets. Back when he first met Yu Lang, he had been won over by the man’s poetic skill. Afraid that he was again slighting some gifted soul, he hurried back despite Xue Wenyang’s attempts to stop him.

“Go on, then. Let me hear it.”

“Today I sat upon the street,
With empty purse and hungry belly.
Just lamenting heaven envies talent,
When two gentlemen happened by.”

After reciting his improvised poem, the beggar still looked unsatisfied, as though intoxicated by his own genius and lost in a dreamy ecstasy.

“That’s it?” Xie Zhiqian nearly wanted to take out his ears, wash them clean, and put them back in again. Such a wretched poem was an insult to the cultivated mind. He tossed a steamed bun over. “Since you call the two of us gentlemen, take this bun and eat it. But in the future, you had best come out less often and make a fool of yourself.”

The beggar flung the bun back at him. “Wooden blockheads who cannot appreciate my talent do not deserve to be called gentlemen, and are not worthy of making me eat their steamed buns.”

Seeing the beggar’s thoroughly self-important manner, Xue Wenyang’s anger faded too. He found the whole thing absurdly funny. The man truly had no idea how little he amounted to, and still imagined himself a peerless genius.

“Two donkeys wander the street,
And meet a genius without shame.
Mountain delicacies and fine seafood I do not care for,
Much less one foul steamed bun.”

The beggar then proceeded to improvise yet another twisted little poem.

“I am an immortal of wine,
Yet my purse is empty.
I came here to drift through one night,
And tomorrow sleep upon the street.”

A low voice drifted over from afar.

The beggar straightened at once. “Who? Who dares steal this genius’s masterpiece?”

Yu Lang, strolling toward them, unfolded a wrinkled sheet of paper in his hand. “Tut, tut. So the great fake poetry immortal still remembers the nonsense he wrote. Then do you also remember the romantic debts you owe?”

Yu Lang had originally come to the Western Market with Du Fu to find Xue Wenyang and the others, only to run into the very man whom Li Yazian had long yearned to meet: the original fake poetry immortal himself.

The beggar was at least bold enough to own it. “I wrote that poem for Lady Li Yazian. It was indeed worth fifty taels of silver. It is a pity there are far too many fools in this world who cannot recognize real value.”